A Literary Journal Series

Dropping Every Thirteen Days Or So…

New Orleans is hot. It’s so hot here that—I’m sorry to share—my eyeballs are sweating. I know this because my contact lenses refuse to attach themselves. Instead, they kayak around my eyes, unmoored and happy, free from my demands.

But the heat is a weakling when pitted against the noise of this place, a city Tennessee Williams called ‘the last frontier of Bohemia’. Here, the heat makes the wood creak; the breeze turns branches into restless fingers.

For me, it starts small–in the hotel there’s a whooshing in the cistern that activates every 10 minutes. I keep thinking there’s someone in the bathroom. On check-out, when Sasha asks me if I enjoyed my stay, I say that I did except the whooshing. She stares straight through me, as if the air between us eats my words. She replies, “I’m glad, Nathalie–be sure to come back anytime”. I don’t care that she got my name wrong; I like her, even though she pretends there’s no whooshing. I only care when people I don’t like get my name wrong.

I have a few hours to kill before my Airbnb check-in, so I leave my luggage at the hotel and walk towards the French Quarter. As I wander along Decatur, Dumaine, Tchoupitoulas, someone talks to me every few steps. Within minutes of reaching the Quarter, someone bets me five dollars he can guess where I got my shoes. I’d just bought new shoes after my old pair finally surrendered. I am mesmerised by this offer of live magic. I stand there waiting for him to guess where I’d bought them. “You got them on your feet, am I right?” he giggles. I hand him the money, and stop for a Bloody Mary at a café; there is a small fountain next to the jazz trio playing, and three sparrows bathing themselves in it. The drummer is extraordinary. He erases the very existence of the cistern’s whooshing.

A slight aside. I’ve seen three David Bowie doppelgängers in the last twenty-four hours. Three. I wonder what David is trying to say to me—to us. The only problem is that all three are dressed in ways that would have dismayed Bowie himself. I’m still no closer to deciphering the message when, while covering myself in the icing sugar of a Café du Monde beignet triptych, a busker starts playing the opening chords of Space Oddity. He’s joined by a singer who sounds like a rubber glove. That’s when I realise Bowie has no message. He is merely entertaining himself at our expense again. Oh, David.

Along Decatur Street, I hear what can only be described as an ass cheek trying to play music. It is the single worst sound I have ever heard. I ask a man who is also frowning what on earth it is. “It’s coming from Steamboat Natchez,” he says. “It’s calliope music.” “Calliope? Like the goddess?” I can’t believe that Calliope herself has been recruited into this mess. I direct my hardest frown at the music and look sombrely at the vendors who must work every day in front of this musical monstrosity.

My navy dress is now half cotton, half icing sugar, so I find a bathroom and attempt to clean myself. Then it’s time to check into my apartment on Bourbon Street. Yes, Bourbon Street, but the residential end, I keep chirping to anyone who warns me against it. I enter the building and am greeted with the whirr of a thousand whooshes, increasing my affection for the hotel cistern. All is forgiven. The second member of the welcome party is a pool of water and a drip. I sigh.

I know what I have to do, but I sit on the edge of the bed and count to ten. I ring the landlord, explain that the air conditioner sounds like a jet propellor and there is water everywhere. According to him, it doesn’t make that noise, and there isn’t any water. I reassure him there very much is. As an Irishwoman, I like my damp where I can see it: outside.

And so we have a merry-go-round until my phone reception drops. I stare out at the beautiful spires of St. Louis Cathedral and know what I have to do. The landlord and I are never going to meet on the same reality plane, so I lift myself up and return to the hotel to form a new plan.

“Nathalie, you’re back!” the receptionist smiles and kisses me on both cheeks. The concierge nods knowingly. He is from Haiti and we had talked football. A receptionist I’ve never met or spoken to says, “Hello Miss Sarah”.

I am home.